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Analysing International Student Mobility Flows in Higher Education: A Comparative Study on European Countries

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Abstract

The analysis of the factors pulling and pushing students in a foreign country to complete their higher education is key for the implementation of university policies aimed at increasing the number of credits gained by students abroad and hence the degree of internationalisation of institutions. Consistent with previous studies, the present contribution examines the roles played by countries in the Erasmus student mobility flows by considering a joint strategy of analysis based on social network analysis and exploratory data analysis. First, data on Erasmus student exchanges among countries are gathered at macro-level from the European Union Open Data Portal and network data structures are analysed. Second, educational indicators from the Eurostat website are collected to describe the investments in higher education. The main findings suggest the presence of a core-periphery configuration in the student mobility network with few central countries in which the economic benefits and the investments in education seem to act as key elements for university attractiveness.

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Notes

  1. Note that, in the following analyses, we report the main findings by using absolute values in the Erasmus student mobility networks. The results obtained after performing the procedure for the normalisation of the link weights proposed in the related literature (Breznik et al. 2013; Breznik and Ragozini 2015) have shown similar results in terms of countries’ ranking position.

  2. For details see https://data.europa.eu/euodp/en/data/publisher/eac.

  3. Since no particular differences emerge in the ranking obtained by sorting countries according to the hub and authority scores computed for all years, the results are reported for the first and last academic years.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics and Statistics, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, Fisciano (Salerno), Italy

    Marialuisa Restaino

  2. Department of Political and Social Studies, University of Salerno, Via Giovanni Paolo II, 132, Fisciano (Salerno), Italy

    Maria Prosperina Vitale & Ilaria Primerano

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  1. Marialuisa Restaino
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  2. Maria Prosperina Vitale
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  3. Ilaria Primerano
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Correspondence to Marialuisa Restaino.

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Restaino, M., Vitale, M.P. & Primerano, I. Analysing International Student Mobility Flows in Higher Education: A Comparative Study on European Countries. Soc Indic Res 149, 947–965 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11205-020-02282-2

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